WELL IT IS BACK TO the hacking scandal, after part of James Murdoch’s evidence to the parliamentary committee has now been brought into question by two News International ex-employees , Colin Myler (ex NoW editor) and Tom Crone (legal manager). Apparently, when James Murdoch told the committee that he was not aware of an email that suggested the hacking scandal went further than a single rogue reporter, he was (according to Myler and Crone) deliberately lying to the committee.
James Murdoch has said: “I stand by my testimony to the select committee”. But Myler and Crone have allowed the Murdoch’s many enemies to have another go; and they have wasted no time in trying to bring the hapless tycoon once more to London to face the will of parliament.
What shall we call them; a hypocrisy of politicians? I find it repellent that such a group, representing a body of people that have been brought so low in public estimation, should be allowed to investigate the behaviour of anyone, let alone, in Rupert Murdoch’s case, someone who stands (even in his current frail state), far, far above his inquisitors.
It matters little to me whether celebrities had their mobile’s voice mail hacked into by a an unscrupulous band of red top journalists. After all, it was those very journalists who helped promote their careers in the first place, with very little protest from the celebs about press intrusion when favourable publicity was the result of such impositions.
First of all hacking was not the sole occupation of News International journalists; other tabloids took advantage of the same technology to do the same thing: just as would have been the case between the 1960s and 1980s, had digital technology made it possible to do so. Human nature being human nature, and ambition being a component of such a nature; who can say that even Woodwood and Bernstein would not have taken full advantage of its services to bring down their equivalent to Rupert Murdoch – Richard Millhouse Nixon.
I HAD NOT HEARD OF Labour MP Tom Watson until he sat facing the Murdoch’s. But apparently he had stuck limpet-like to the hull of News International, concentrating, it seems, all of his mental energies upon bringing down this empire. This industriousness was to earn him brownie points from the media, after his interrogation of the father and his son in the Wilson Room.
When I am confronted with such an obsession, I start to question the motives (in this case) of the parliamentary investigator; but then, apart from whatever personal motives may be involved, Mr Watson is a member of a political party whose back benchers, as well as the party’s rank and file, all have their anti-Murdoch grievances.
In the Labour Party as with the Mafia, aged resentments are never allowed to whither on the vine, but kept busy. In Murdoch’s case his company’s crimes against Old Labour’s core support within the working class still wrangle with the likes of Tom Watson and Labour’s rank and file. Even New Labour which delivered power to the party from 1997-2010, could not, it now seems, bury this resentment despite Murdoch’s support for the party throughout those years at election times.
Why Tom Watson is so popular among his fellow MPs and the media generally is because, like him, they want rid of Murdoch, and will beatify any source from wherever it comes that drives the stake into the vampires heart.
IF I WERE JAMES MURDOCH, I would pronounce myself unavailable to once more appear before this parliamentary compilation representing the morally questionable Members of Parliament. The Murdoch’s have little to fear from the Wilson Committee Room, upon any return; even if Myler and Crone are proved right and James is an out and out liar, the Murdoch’s need not fear this body of gentlemen and women.
If James Murdoch knew more than he told what does it mean? After all, let us remember this. The British public did not object to the invasion of any celebrities’ privacy, no matter how it was managed. But what rankled with them, as well as myself, and set this whole hare running, was when such practices were being deployed against the likes of little Millie Dowler and other ordinary people who sought only privacy for themselves. It was when such people became targets that the British public turned on the journalists.
Until such ordinary people were targeted, the public cared little about the privacy of celebrities; and the likes of Tom Watson found little support for his campaign against News International.
If I have one criticism of News International, it is that Rupert Murdoch closed down the News of the World to appease his critics, in order to help in his takeover of BSkyB. The NoW had a current total readership of some five million people. As a paper with a 168 year history, it was a staple of many a working class Sunday; and it was George Orwell who essayed its importance to the British working class. But it never appealed to the leadership of the Labour Party who saw it as an incumbent upon its attempts to “lift” the working class out of such lowly allegiances.
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